While it’s never been confirmed, some cut voice lines from the original release of Persona 4 indicated that once upon a time, the protagonist’s right-hand party member Yosuke was romanceable. Instead what we ended up getting was a mostly quite homophobic character who never really moves past that mentality, though the upcoming Personal 4 Revival will apparently be changing Yosuke a bit. Though one thing it won’t be doing, apparently, is adding that romance back in, even if the devs did consider it.
Speaking to GamesRadar about the requests for a romanceable Yosuke option in the remake, producer Kazuhisa Wada explained, “I was aware that some people were talking online about, like, ‘Oh, Yosuke,’ and they were kind of hoping for that. But we were thinking, if we did Yosuke, we kind of would have to do all the other male characters as well. And if we did that, that is a lot of work. So we were thinking about our time and schedule. I don’t know if we could actually handle this, so we decided to let Yosuke float on by.”
I’m certainly in two minds about this comment. On the one hand, it feels a touch like a cop out, as I don’t even know why every main NPC has to be romanceable in the first place. On the other, I’m not sure I’d personally want a Yosuke romance. While Wada has admitted that Yosuke was “a little bit insensitive in terms of how he treats outsiders sometimes,” and that the changes will make him fit better in “the world we live in now,” I question what that means exactly.
Will he simply not be homophobic anymore? It’s a quality quite baked into his character, and I’d rather a remake examine that and have his arc be more about confronting his bigoted opinions and apologising for the actions he took because of them. There is a general read on Yosuke that sees a lot of what he says as internalised homophobia too, but if the game were to just ignore he was ever like that and throw in a romance option, it would just feel like painting over a mouldy wall to me. Fingers crossed the changes feel natural at least.